Charles Hoffbauer was highly regarded in his lifetime as a fine painter, and muralist as well as an artist successful with the numerous drawings, which served as preparatory studies for his finished works.He was born in France and studied there with Gustave Moreau and Fernand Cormon and exhibited in the late 1890s with the Paris Salon. He was a prolific artist who once inscribed on a sketchbook page with apparent gratification: “Today I made 59 drawings!” This disclosure would not ordinarily have been mentioned since quantity, of course, is never a measure of talent, but the high level of artistic quality that runs consistently through all of Hoffbauers work, from the slightest pencil sketch to the finished tempera study and reveals a draughtsman of unusual ability.His mural decorations are in the Confederate Memorial Hall in Richmond, Virginia.
